LinkedIn is becoming China’s go-to platform for recruiting foreign spies

Written by

Jeff Stone Mar 26, 2019 | CYBERSCOOP
Buried in the 41-page felony complaint charging a former U.S. intelligence operative of spying for the Chinese, FBI investigators declare that the suspect, Ron Rockwell Hansen, had been printing information from his colleagues’ LinkedIn pages. Hansen, a former Defense Intelligence Agency case officer who pleaded guilty on March 15 to attempted espionage against the U.S., took information from the professional networking site related to several former and current DIA case officers before a 2015 trip to China. Xu allegedly worked as a regional deputy director of an agency controlled by China’s Ministry of State Security until October, when he became the first Chinese spy extradited to the U.S. Xu was arrested as part of a case in which Chinese operatives used LinkedIn to message a GE Aviation engineer in 2017.

Source: www.cyberscoop.com